The design of devices, such as mobile telephone handsets, is becoming increasingly varied and more complex for manufacturers attempting to differentiate such devices from those of their competitors.
In particular, the traditional ‘candy bar’ design of mobile telephone handsets, where the handset comprises generally of a single, substantially rectangular body part, is now considered relatively uninteresting.
Furthermore, it is a significant design consideration to minimise the general size of the handset, in particular when not in use, for example when in a standby mode/configuration. Due to the practical limitations of how small a keypad and a display can be designed, whilst maintaining functionality and usability, the candy bar design suffers from severe practical limitations in how small the handset can be designed.
To overcome these problems, numerous variations in design have been utilised by handset manufacturers. Well known design variations include clam-shell designs, slide designs, rotation designs, etc.
In general, such designs comprise two body parts: one comprising a keypad; the other comprising a screen or display. In this way, the keypad and/or display can be ‘hidden’ when the handset is not in use, i.e. when in a standby mode/configuration, thereby significantly reducing the size of the device.
As will be appreciated by a skilled artisan, a problem encountered by such designs is that of communication between the two body parts. For each of these body parts, a mechanism is required for not only facilitating and permitting movement between the two body parts, but also for enabling communication there between.
Known mechanisms in general rely on one of two principle methods of electrically coupling the two body parts: the first method utilises wires or cables; and the second method uses brush contacts.
Using wires or cables, it is possible to provide a plurality of individual channels, but a designer needs to consider preventing twisting of the wires/cables. Consequently, for rotation designs, the rotation is limited to less than 360 degrees. Furthermore, for slide designs, it is necessary to provide a volume in which the cables/wires are located. This is extremely wasteful of value space, in particular in relation to devices such as mobile telephone handsets, where size is a key design factor.
With brush contacts, channel density and transfer rate are limited due to size constraints. Furthermore they are mechanically relatively complicated to manufacture and unreliable.
As will be appreciated by a skilled artisan, use of these known methods of providing communication between the two body parts necessarily requires accepting one or more of the aforementioned limitations.
Thus, there exists a need for an improved method and apparatus for providing communication between moveable body parts of an electronic device.